The Senator And the Street

Chuck Schumer, his financial constituents, and his next move.

Schumer has been quiet on financial reform, and Republicans are revelling in his dilemma.

Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark

Charles Schumer, the senior senator from New York, is a voluble politician who has lately been having moments of uncharacteristic reticence. This temperance comes after several years during which Schumer’s national prominence has soared. Since his election to the Senate, in 1998, after an epic campaign in which he unseated the longtime incumbent, Alfonse D’Amato, Schumer has become renowned for a hunger for work and for publicity; he holds press events on many Sundays, to take advantage of what tends to be a slow news day. During the last two election cycles, Schumer served as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, helping to take his party from forty-five to sixty seats in the chamber. His Democratic colleagues, in gratitude, voted him vice-chair of the party conference—the third-ranking leader in the Senate.

Schumer’s prominence has come at some cost. He sits on both the Finance Committee and the Banking Committee, and has long toiled as a principal voice for Wall Street in Washington. But this summer, when he and his colleagues passed the most comprehensive overhaul of securities legislation in more than a generation, Schumer was relegated to a nearly silent role. Earlier this month, Schumer voted for the financial-reform package—without saying much about it.

Just three years ago, in a more typical moment for him, Schumer went to City Hall to announce a different kind of financial-reform plan. He and Mayor Michael Bloomberg had commissioned the consulting firm McKinsey to conduct a study of the future of the financial industry in New York. “I’m obsessed with this issue,” Schumer told assembled reporters on January 22, 2007. Based on interviews with “more than fifty financial services industry CEOs and business leaders,” the McKinsey authors concluded that what Wall Street needed was less regulation. In order to keep the financial industry from fleeing to London and other locations, according to the study, the government had to relax some of the reporting requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which had been passed in response to the collapse of Enron, and to limit lawsuits against Wall Street firms. Schumer said at the event, “We are not going to rest until we change the rules, change the laws, and make sure that New York stays No. 1 for decades on into the future.”

“The McKinsey report was a symptom of the huge amount of pushback from the financial industry,” Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America, said recently. “The message was, we need to lighten up on the reins on Wall Street and the corporate community generally. Schumer was one of the leading spokespeople for that message.”

At the time, prosperity on Wall Street seemed part of a virtuous circle for Schumer. More profits meant more jobs for New York and more campaign contributions for the D.S.C.C., for which he raised a record two hundred and forty million dollars. Then, of course, the financial industry imploded, almost taking the American economy with it, and lax regulation turned out to be a principal cause of the debacle.

In this way, Schumer looks the opposite of prescient, and his fund-raising success looks like compensation for his advocacy for Wall Street. It was, for example, a Schumer amendment to legislation in 2006 that barred the Securities and Exchange Commission from overseeing credit-rating agencies, like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service. That change now seems almost reckless, given that credit-rating firms, which were paid by the companies whose often dubious securities they evaluated, played an ignominious role in the crash. Over the years, Schumer has successfully argued for Wall Street’s pet projects, from cutting the fees that financial firms pay to fund the S.E.C. to allowing commercial banks and investment banks to merge.

“The financial-regulatory bill is a total no-win for Chuck,” Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, a non-profit organization of the city’s business leadership, said. “He’s been a tremendous advocate for us. What’s changed is that the American public is angry at Wall Street and at Congress.”

The internal politics of the Senate have also served to mute Schumer’s voice. Harry Reid, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, is facing a challenging race for a fifth term in Nevada, potentially opening the door for Schumer to replace him. But, in keeping with senatorial tradition, Schumer must not acknowledge the possibility that the job of leader will become vacant or that he has any interest in filling it. “I hope Harry Reid will be the Majority Leader,” Schumer told me. “It’s not even fair to him to even think about that.”

This kind of silence about political reality, and about his own ambition, does not come easily to any politician, much less one as outspoken as Chuck Schumer. To date, Schumer has paid only a modest political price for his embrace of Wall Street. In his race for a third term, this fall, he has amassed a war chest of nearly twenty-four million dollars, more than any other Senate candidate in the nation, and drawn only token opposition. (The designated Republican contender is Gary Berntsen, a former C.I.A. agent who now runs a consulting firm on Long Island.) Nevertheless, Republicans are revelling in Schumer’s dilemma.

“Schumer is in a tough spot in New York,” John Thune, the Republican senator from South Dakota, who is a likely Presidential candidate in 2012, said. “He raised a lot of money on Wall Street. He’s their advocate here. Now we’re talking about financial reform, and he’s nowhere to be found in that debate.”

Schumer is not entirely quiet these days, at least on safer subjects. Following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Schumer has denounced B.P. with regularity. Over a series of Sundays, he launched a crusade to force airlines to forgo charging passengers for their carry-on luggage.

The departures of Hillary Clinton and Eliot Spitzer from the political scene have left Schumer as indisputably the most nationally prominent New York Democrat. In this role, he has come to seem to many Republicans as the embodiment of undisciplined liberalism. Schumer often dresses in clothes that look like they’ve been stored in tense adjacency to Chinese-food containers. He is six feet tall and turns sixty a few weeks after Election Day, and although he bikes through Brooklyn regularly, to stay fit and to keep an eye on his core constituency, he is far from lithe. In Washington, he lives in a famously unhygienic Capitol Hill town house with three other members of Congress. (“Our rats scare our cockroaches,” said Bill Delahunt, a congressman from Massachusetts, who shares the downstairs living room with Schumer.) In the nineties, according to Schumer, CBS considered doing a situation comedy, to be called “Four in the House,” about the town house, but the project did not come to fruition.

Schumer’s aggressive personal style is so distinctive that it tends to overshadow his substantive views, which do not comport with what many expect of him. “The state needs people who are fiscally conservative, and Schumer is at the other end of the spectrum. He is a big-government liberal,” Edward F. Cox, the chairman of the New York Republican State Committee (and Richard Nixon’s son-in-law), said. “He’s about having more and bigger governmental direction and takeovers of different sectors of the economy, and more government programs that don’t deliver what they promise and have adverse impacts on the national economy.”

The stereotype of Schumer as a classic big-government liberal does not square with his legislative record. “He’s not really that much of a liberal,” Claire McCaskill, the Democratic senator from Missouri, said. “He is a very pragmatic legislator.” Schumer told me, “Let’s say you rank all the Democrats in the Senate by how liberal they are. If Bernie Sanders is No. 1 and Ben Nelson is No. 59, I figure I am around No. 20.” (Last year, the Americans for Democratic Action accorded Schumer a Liberal Quotient of ninety-five per cent, ranking him behind sixteen Democrats and tied with twenty-six others. Sanders, who represents Vermont, had a hundred per cent, and Nelson, of Nebraska, seventy per cent.)

Schumer spends his days in search of laws that represent a kind of lowest common denominator—ideas that will appeal to the least partisan member of a highly determined Republican opposition. In this respect, he is a creature of the modern Senate—a place where nearly constant filibusters have made sixty-vote majorities virtually obligatory to approve even the most routine legislation or the least controversial nominees. By historic standards, the Democrats’ current majority gives them a sizable advantage, but they have struggled to make use of it.

Schumer was never much of a firebrand, and he becomes less of one all the time. His selection as Majority Leader would mark the ascendance of a certain view of the Senate—and of the Democratic Party. Schumer’s probable competition for Majority Leader is Richard Durbin, of Illinois, who is Reid’s deputy and would likely bring a more confrontational face to the caucus. (Durbin was Obama’s mentor in the Senate, and the two men remain close.) Schumer may look like an ideologue, but he is an incrementalist, whose legislative passions have run to ideas of such limited ambition that it’s not always clear whether they accomplish anything at all.

To become that kind of legislator, Schumer has had to stray from his political roots—as he learned in synagogue last fall. “After the third aliyah at Yom Kippur services, I always offer some spontaneous blessings to the Schumers,” said Rabbi Andy Bachman, who presides at Congregation Beth Elohim, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where the Schumer family has long attended services. “And last year what came out of my mouth was that I thanked Iris for all her service to the city and state”—Iris Weinshall, who is married to Schumer, is a longtime local-government official—“and then what popped out of my mouth when I started talking about Chuck was that I wished him greater strength as he was working on health-care legislation. Suddenly, when I said that, fourteen hundred people got up and started cheering. It was hilarious, a classic Park Slope liberal moment.”

At the time he was being cheered on by his congregation, Schumer was actually desperate to turn the subject away from health care. Outside such reliable precincts, the political reception for President Obama’s reform plan had not been positive. The Democrats were about to lose governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, and Scott Brown was on his way to winning the late Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. Like many veteran Democrats, including Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, Schumer had strongly advised the President against making an ambitious health-care proposal the centerpiece of his Administration. Obama pressed ahead despite them.

“To do health care was a noble, good thing, and it will help America dramatically. I don’t begrudge Barack Obama choosing it, even though if I were President I might not have,” Schumer told me, when the fate of the reform bill was still uncertain. “However, you had to relate health care to the average middle-class person, and why it would help them. And seventy-five per cent of Americans have health care that they are fundamentally—I wouldn’t say happy with, but not unhappy with it.” Schumer pointed out that while thirty million Americans were uninsured, only about eleven per cent of them were voters—a small group to merit such a large investment of Democrats’ political capital. Traditionally, of course, it is support for such needy outsiders that defines what it means to be a liberal.

Despite his misgivings, Schumer did more than his part to see the health-care bill passed in the Senate. On the eve of the final vote, in December, he helped to negotiate the so-called Cornhusker kickback, with Ben Nelson, who was the last Democratic holdout on the bill. (Following an outcry, the provision, which gave Nebraska additional federal funds to cover Medicaid costs, was removed from the final bill.) But Schumer thought that the Democrats had gone off track. The message was wrong, and, he told me, “it’s not just about the messaging. It’s conceiving what you are doing and aiming at the middle class.”

After Brown won the Senate race in Massachusetts, and the Obama agenda seemed stalled, Schumer told a meeting of his fellow Democratic senators, “If we ignore that and don’t change, we are like Thelma and Louise. We are headed right over the cliff. They were all saying, in as loud a voice as they could, all the middle-class people of Massachusetts—listen to us.” As he explained to me, “What the public hates the most is when they think the politicians aren’t listening to them. They understand that we can’t solve all their problems with a snap of our fingers, but they sure want us to try, because we are public servants.” Schumer said that Obama needed to heed the voters in Massachusetts and change course. “They said, ‘We’re not against doing health care, but right now we are hurting. Jobs, the economy, stretching the middle-class paycheck—which even those with jobs are having a tough time doing—start doing that.’ That’s what they said.”

Obama didn’t listen—at least, not to Schumer’s version of the message from the Massachusetts voters. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, goaded Obama to persevere on health care, and he forced Congress to bring the issue to a head, and won passage of the most important domestic legislation in several decades.

When I spoke to Schumer a few weeks after the bill passed, he had already adapted. “President Obama stood tall,” Schumer said. “We had a meeting shortly after Massachusetts and there was only one person in that room who said, ‘We are going to get it done, and we’re going to get it done before Easter.’ And it was him. He stuck with it. He has an internal gyroscope.”

Schumer’s pragmatism leads him into what appear to be unlikely alliances, like his recent one with Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican senator from Utah. A senator since Sarah Palin was twelve years old, Hatch embodied the Republican Party’s base before the term even existed. But Hatch long ago also earned a reputation as a legislative dealmaker, and today he’s making deals with Schumer. “I think Chuck is the kind of guy who can figure out how to solve problems. He plays politics, but he respects the political needs of both sides,” Hatch told me. Comparing Schumer to Hatch’s longtime friend Ted Kennedy, Hatch went on, “I fought with Kennedy all the time, but we accomplished a lot together, too. That’s how it can be with Chuck.”

One day earlier this year, Hatch and I were talking in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building, when Schumer appeared, to give an interview at the cable-news camera location where Hatch had just finished.

“Hey,” Schumer called out to Hatch, “are you the guy I just saw in the orange tie talking about”—Schumer put on a deep mocking voice—“ ‘the Democrats want a single-payer plan’?” (The debate over the health-care-reform bill was ongoing at the time.)

“Hey, Orrin,” Schumer went on, “show him your mezuzah. He wears a mezuzah all the time.” (A mezuzah is a tiny Hebrew prayer scroll that many Jews wear around their necks.)

Hatch, who is a Mormon, unbuttoned his shirt and displayed the silver case holding the scroll. “I love the Jewish people,” he said.

“There are very close ties between the Jewish and Mormon people,” Schumer said, before leaving to do his live shot.

Indeed, like many in the conservative wing of the Republican Party, Schumer is a reflexive supporter of the Israeli government, including after its recent assault on the Turkish aid flotilla to Gaza. He also supported the Iraq War.

Moments later, Schumer returned and knelt down behind Hatch. From that position, Schumer started talking in the Utahan’s voice, as if his colleague were a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Chuck Schumer is the finest, most bipartisan legislator that I know,” Schumer said. Hatch then dutifully repeated the sentiment word for word.

Late last year, Schumer asked his staff to look for a jobs proposal that wasn’t too complicated or expensive. The staff came back with a new take on an idea that had been kicking around both Democratic and Republican policy circles for some time—and one for which Hatch would become a prominent Republican ally. Any private-sector employer who hired a worker who had been unemployed for at least sixty days would not have to pay the 6.2 per cent Social Security payroll tax on that employee for 2010. The estimated cost to the federal treasury would be about ten billion dollars in lost revenues. Hatch and Schumer collaborated on an Op-Ed piece, to announce their alliance on the proposal, and it ran in the Times on January 26th.

The Schumer-Hatch bill went first to the Senate Finance Committee, which is chaired by Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat. Working with Republican members of his committee, Baucus came up with his own proposal—one that kept the Schumer-Hatch tax cut and extended several others that expired at the end of 2009. The total cost to the deficit rose to about eighty-five billion dollars.

Harry Reid had to resolve the impasse. Under the previous Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, Schumer’s Senate career had languished, but it has soared under Reid, who became party leader in 2005. “Harry Reid and I are foxhole buddies,” Schumer told me. “We’ve been through the wars together. Just as important to me personally, in terms of loyalty, he made me. I have all my ideas and whatever else I have, but the previous leadership basically ignored me. I wanted to be on the Finance Committee—I think I have a good head for the Finance Committee—they didn’t think that. So Harry Reid made me, and I am loyal to him. Period, period, period.”

Reid took the bill away from Baucus’s committee and sent it straight to the Senate floor—with most of Baucus’s provisions removed. By mid-February, the “jobs bill” was basically just the Schumer-Hatch proposal, with a couple of other, relatively minor and uncontroversial ideas tacked on. On February 24th, the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act, as it was dubbed, passed the Senate by a vote of seventy to twenty-eight. Obama signed the bill into law on March 18th, with Schumer standing by his side.

By contemporary standards, the path from conception to passage was remarkably swift. Indeed, for many involved in the process, the very fact that the Senate managed to do something—anything—about jobs in a bipartisan manner seemed almost more noteworthy than the question of what the bill might actually accomplish. “It was in my view a nice moment in the current political environment,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who was a top adviser to John McCain’s Presidential campaign, told me. “I was pleased that it used tax policy. I think that is more effective than another big spending bill. But it’s a fifteen-billion-dollar initiative in a fourteen-trillion-dollar economy. It’s not a panacea.”

According to one assessment, by Mark Zandi, of Moody’s Economy.com, the bill would create up to three hundred thousand jobs, but others cast doubt on those numbers. Dean Baker, the co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, wrote that “the Schumer-Hatch tax credit will probably create almost no jobs.” According to Baker, the normal churn of employees departing and arriving meant that many of the newly hired would have been hired without the tax credit—which was too small to spur much hiring on its own. “It truly is money for nothing,” he wrote.

Schumer had a psychological, as much as an economic, defense of his plan. “Here is one thing I’ve learned being involved in economic issues over the years,” he told me. “When I got to Washington, I used to think, Oh, you know, politics, it’s a lot of hype and fluff. But you go to the markets and they are immutable and you can’t fool them. And, the longer I am around, I think it’s the market’s psychology that matters dramatically. So if the local businessman thinks, Hey, they’ve got a good plan here, and over the next two or three years the economy is going to get going, he is likely to spend more—all because of the little Schumer-Hatch proposal.”

Since then, Schumer has been trying to push more jobs bills through the Senate. “One at a time, make it simple, bring it for a vote for a week,” he told me. “The Republicans vote no, we win—and, if the Republicans vote yes, we win.” On June 8th, he went to the Senate Radio-Television Gallery to announce that the Democrats had proposed another bill. “Democrats in the Senate are again keeping our eye on the ball by keeping jobs number one on the agenda,” he said on that occasion. “Make no mistake about it: This is a jobs bill.”

The legislation that Schumer introduced is, in a modest way, a jobs bill, but his proposal appears to be, like the Schumer-Hatch plan, primarily a political strategy. The June 8th plan offers a few tax breaks for small businesses, and closes a handful of foreign tax loopholes, hoping to limit the outsourcing of jobs, but, as Schumer acknowledges, another purpose of the bill is symbolic—to demonstrate to voters that Democrats care about the economy.

Schumer’s characteristic ebullience reaches a crescendo at home in Brooklyn. Settling into a Barcalounger in his den, when I visited not long ago, Schumer said, “I’m happy. When I sit in this chair, I am happy. We love it here. God willing, I’ll die here. God willing, not too soon.” He suggested that I look out the window. “I love the view,” he said, pointing. “If it weren’t for that building, you could see the Statue of Liberty!”

When Schumer was first elected to the House, in 1980, his district included East Flatbush, Midwood, and Marine Park. He was raised in Sheepshead Bay, where his father was an exterminator, and, the year he ran for Congress, he married Iris Weinshall, who had grown up in Brighton Beach. When he ran for reëlection, the district had been redrawn, and he also became the congressman for much of Park Slope, which was gentrifying quickly. At Weinshall’s instigation, the couple looked at the handful of doorman buildings that had been built along Prospect Park West in the nineteen-twenties, before the Great Depression began a long decline in the area. “Now, remember, in 1982, interest rates were nineteen, twenty per cent, so housing prices were plummeting because no one was paying nineteen per cent,” Schumer said. “So we figured we would refinance. But we come into this place, we love this place, but it’s a hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars. I’m making a congressman’s salary, which was probably thirty-five, she’s a low-level civil servant with the city government, and I say, ‘We can’t afford this. It’s too big.’ She says you always reach for real estate. So we stretched. We bought it for a hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars. A few years later, we refinanced. Now it’s the only major asset we own, but it’s worth much more, probably ten times that.” (A few years ago, when Schumer was head of the D.S.C.C., he took a group of Senate candidates, including Amy Klobuchar, now the senior senator from Minnesota, and their families on a bike tour of Brooklyn. “Chuck has a bullhorn, and he stops in front of his building and announces that he and Iris bought their apartment for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and now it’s worth ten times that much,” Klobuchar recalled. “And my twelve-year-old daughter pulled on my jacket and said, ‘Mom, if you said that in Minnesota, you’d be in so much trouble.’ ”)

Weinshall did not remain a low-level civil servant for long. Mayor Rudy Giuliani named her Transportation Commissioner, and she remained on the job under Bloomberg. In 2007, she became a vice-chancellor at the City University of New York. In several months of conversations with Schumer, he cheerfully interrupted almost all of them for cell-phone conversations with Weinshall or one of their two daughters, one a recent graduate of Yale Law School and the other an undergraduate at Harvard College.

Schumer also used the Park Slope apartment for candidate recruiting during his tenure as head of the D.S.C.C. Jeff Merkley was the speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives and weighing a challenge to the Republican incumbent, Gordon Smith, when Schumer summoned him to Brooklyn in early 2007. “He had just come back from one of his Sunday press conferences, and he was a little late,” Merkley recalled. The two men had never met before. “We bonded because we were working-class kids who did really well on our S.A.T.s and got to go to good colleges as a result,” Merkley said. (After graduating from James Madison High School, Schumer went to Harvard. His board scores may have been improved by a part-time job helping a Madison teacher named Stanley Kaplan get his test-preparation business off the ground.)

“Smith’s standard operating procedure had been to spend money early, to damage the reputations of the people who ran against him,” Merkley said. “Chuck was emphatic. He said anytime I was attacked I had to respond within twenty-four hours. And he was clear that the D.S.C.C. would be there for me financially. They would be there until I could raise the money to respond. And he kept his word to me.” In November, 2008, Merkley defeated Smith by three percentage points.

Schumer’s political dexterity, more than any fixed ideology, is reflected in his work bringing the Senate Democrats from minority to majority status. Shortly after Robert P. Casey, Jr., was elected state treasurer of Pennsylvania, in 2004, he got a call from Schumer asking him to challenge Rick Santorum, a two-term Republican incumbent, in the 2006 race. “I wasn’t thinking of running for the Senate at all,” Casey said. “So Chuck called me, and I had all these arguments ready—I had only run for state office, it’s hard to run against an incumbent. But Chuck had thought of all of them before me, and he had good answers.”

There was, however, the question of abortion. Casey, like his father, a former governor, was staunchly opposed to abortion rights and thus, he thought, an unlikely recipient of support from the national Democratic Party. Yet Schumer, an abortion-rights supporter, waved off Casey’s concern, saying that the importance of beating Santorum trumped reproductive rights. “Chuck took a lot of shrapnel for supporting me on that one,” Casey said. (Some pro-choice groups denounced the D.S.C.C. for backing Casey.) “He took the time to know my issues. He didn’t just want to talk about what he needed.” Casey defeated Santorum by eighteen percentage points.

Schumer recruited candidates who could win rather than those with particular beliefs. There were liberals like Sherrod Brown, in Ohio, and Al Franken, in Minnesota, and moderates like Jon Tester, in Montana, and Jim Webb, in Virginia. Claire McCaskill, of Missouri, said, “In 2006, he did something that had never been done before. He cut off incumbents and strong challengers in the closing weeks. If they didn’t need it, they weren’t going to get the money. Instead, he put all his chips on Missouri, Virginia, and Montana—and all three of us won. Chuck knows that the party that has the moderates has the power. The moderates we’ve elected are what gave our senior senators their chairmanships.” (“He was an animal,” said Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, who became the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.)

Above all, Schumer thrived at the D.S.C.C. because of his success as a fund-raiser. This is a bipartisan view. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who took over the National Republican Senatorial Committee for this year’s elections, said, “Chuck did two things. He recruited good candidates and gave them the resources they needed to succeed. Chuck cleaned our clocks because of their funding successes.”

During Schumer’s tenure, the committee raised a record amount—and the financial industry increased its donations to the D.S.C.C. by fifty per cent. At the same time, Schumer was doing the industry’s bidding in Washington. I asked Schumer if he bore any responsibility for what later happened on Wall Street.

“I’m not going to just pile on Wall Street for its own good, but, even in New York, people have the view that politicians who take the view ‘Don’t touch Wall Street’ are not in synch with New York voters,” he said. “I think New York voters are in synch with my view. Not with ‘pile on’ but also not with ‘leave them alone.’ ”

In fact, in recent months Schumer has pivoted with alacrity toward favoring a full range of new regulations on Wall Street, albeit without saying much in public about it. “Chuck is working as a champion for reform,” Heather Booth, the executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of groups, including several liberal organizations, that has been lobbying Congress on the bill, said. “Given his history, I assumed that we would have had areas of differences, but we really haven’t. He’s been strong for reform across the board.” To this end, Schumer has supported greater regulation of hedge funds and private-equity funds and a strong version of the so-called Volcker rule, which limits the ability of big banks to make risky investments. In happier times on Wall Street, Schumer didn’t support measures of this kind.

Schumer’s gyration on financial reform is not terribly surprising, in the light of his tactical approach to politics. He talks incessantly about delivering what middle-class voters want—not what he wants or hopes to provide them. His references to the poor, or to the broader problems of poverty, are sparing. In weighing his own priorities, Schumer always takes into consideration the views of one family in particular, the Baileys, of Massapequa, on Long Island. “The Baileys are always in my head,” he told me.

The Baileys are also only in Schumer’s head, because they are imaginary. Schumer was elected to the State Assembly in 1974, at the age of twenty-three. Around that time, he came up with the idea of a representative middle-class family who could serve as his political lodestar. When he began his long-shot bid to oust D’Amato, in 1998, he introduced his staffers to the Baileys. “It was easy for me to describe them,” he later wrote. “I had known them my whole life. They were the reason I had entered public service. Many of the bills I had passed and the speeches I had given were about them.”

They were originally called the O’Reillys, but when Schumer wrote his political manifesto, “Positively American,” in 2007, he changed their name to the more ethnically anodyne Baileys. (He also wanted to avoid any association with Bill O’Reilly.) Joe Bailey works for an insurance company, and his wife, Eileen, is a part-time administrative assistant in a doctor’s office. “Over the years they have both benefited from government and been frustrated by it. They support government when they feel it supports them, which isn’t often,” Schumer wrote. “Most of the time, it seems to them that government’s focused on someone else—the very poor or the very rich. So, most of the time, they tune government out.”

What is striking about “Positively American,” which was written with Daniel Squadron, a former aide, is that even without the constraints of the legislative process Schumer puts forth an extremely modest and moderate agenda. He proposes to increase federal spending on education, homeland security, and medical research; reduce illegal immigration through the use of a national identity card; and lower childhood obesity by taxing fast-food advertising. Perhaps the most novel proposal is for cell-phone contracts to include what he calls, without false modesty, a “Schumer box,” to advise parents about how to protect their children from online pornography. (Credit-card bills already have a Schumer box.) Besides these unexceptional ideas, there is nothing in Schumer’s book about expanding the number of Americans with health insurance; very little about the environment, global warming, or foreign policy; and only peripheral mentions of the over-all national economy.

All politicians walk the line between bringing their own agenda to the public and responding to the voters’ immediate needs. Successful elected officials both lead and follow. Schumer, more than most, is a follower, and proudly so, of the Baileys.

For the 2010 midterms, Schumer yielded control of the D.S.C.C. to Robert Menendez, of New Jersey, but he still keeps a close eye on the fortunes of Senate Democrats. “This isn’t 1980,” Schumer said. “The Tea Party is a rear guard, not a vanguard. People know they need government in their lives now. We just have to show the middle class how government works for them.” Still, Schumer believes that the Democratic Party’s fortunes largely depend on the unemployment rate and the course of the national economy; neither index looks promising at the moment. “If people don’t think there’s light at the end of the tunnel, then we’re in real trouble,” he said.

Schumer remains optimistic about the long-term fortunes of his party. He regards Obama’s election as a harbinger of a major shift in American politics, like the one in 1932 or, in a different direction, in 1980. “The big tectonic-plate elections are when people redefine their relationship to government,” Schumer said. “If you look at the stream of American history, we’re going to go back to the day when government is going to be an active force to help you. And that is why Obama won. And he won by more because of the recession. And he won by more because he is such an amazingly talented person. And he won because McCain might not have been the best candidate. But he would have won anyway, because the tectonic plates had changed.”

Schumer is legislating in the contemporary Senate’s world of the possible. He was putting together an immigration-reform package with Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, but Graham has bolted from that enterprise, perhaps for good. The immigration proposal that Schumer and other Democrats put forth in April is, as ever, a careful political product; even without Republicans’ coöperation, it closely balances the offer of a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants with conservative ideas on border enforcement.

The question of Schumer’s ultimate goals has a special resonance right now because of Reid’s vulnerability and the chance that Schumer might take over for him. (Reid’s fortunes have improved since he drew Sharron Angle, a Tea Party acolyte with a history of extreme views, as his Republican opponent.) To do so, Schumer will have to get past Reid’s top deputy, Richard Durbin. What gives the putative leadership contest a special frisson, by Washington standards, is that Durbin is the fourth resident of the town house where Schumer lives in Washington. When Durbin arrived as a tenant, in 1992, Schumer had the seniority right to claim the second upstairs bedroom, but he ceded it to Durbin, who remains ensconced there. “He’s my friend,” Schumer said of Durbin. (Spokesmen for Durbin and Reid said that the Senators would have nothing to say about the possibility of a leadership fight.)

Congressional leadership contests often turn more on recondite personal relationships than on actual political differences, but that has not stopped vigorous speculation about the outcome of a Durbin-Schumer contest. Their voting records are comparable. Durbin, who is sixty-five years old, benefits from a longer tenure in the Senate, where seniority is prized. Whether Durbin’s colleagues will see his closeness to the President as an advantage is one of the many unknowns in the handicapping. More than Schumer, Durbin was an outspoken supporter for pressing forward with the health-care initiative, even when the political tides had turned against it.

“They have very similar political profiles,” a Democratic political consultant who has worked with both men said. “If anything, Chuck is seen as someone who looks out for Wall Street, and Dick is someone who has a streak of prairie populism that puts him against the banks.”

Schumer probably offers a more pragmatic, even accommodationist, choice than Durbin. And he is presumed to be the favorite of the dozen-plus new Democrats whose ideologically diverse candidacies he midwifed to success earlier this decade. Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, another member of the Schumer generation in the Senate, said, “In our year, I called Chuck our tenth candidate, because he was so invested in our success.” For Schumer, filling the gap between electoral success and substantive legislation has been elusive. Certainly, though, he has vindicated Whitehouse’s judgment of Schumer as “the schmoozemeister of the world.” ♦